Today, The Reading Guru is hosting an excerpt from creative non-fiction “The Luddite’s Guide to Technology”. Enjoy this excerpt from the conclusion of the book.

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Conclusion:​

In the physics behind gravity, objects are like balls rolling around on a rubber sheet. Everything distorts the sheet around it, a little, and objects roll towards other things that distort the sheet enough, and that is gravity. You are pulled towards other objects in the room, but only the earth’s gravitational pull is enough to easily recognize as ‘gravity’: other things pull you by much less than the weight of a mosquito. The only gravitational pull that really matters is the one downward to the earth.

If something is superlatively heavy, it keeps warping the sheet around it more and more until it becomes a singularity, and something different happens, like the rubber sheet collapses in on itself or rips. It becomes a “gravitationally completely collapsed object”, a gravitational singularity or more commonly a black hole: something so dense that not even light can escape its pull—something so different has happened to the sheet that the feature is different from the “rest” of the sheet altogether.

It is my suggestion that we are in a singularity in this world today, and one of its dimensions is technology in its social aspects, though the singularity includes political, economic, and other dimensions. All of these pieces are about how we live in a singularity, with attention to technology, and connected spirituality, as its dimensions. And it is also about how to live in such a singularity, and what right spirituality looks like.

It might be flippant to call this the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Singularity, but it is a guide to navigating one dimension of the singularity, that of technology. Other dimensions are in genuine continuity.

About The Book

Mammon, as it is challenged in the Sermon on the Mount, represents such wealth and possessions as one could have two thousand years ago. But that is merely beer as contrasted to the eighty proof whisky our day has concocted. The Sermon on the Mount aims to put us in the driver’s seat and not what you could possess in ancient times, and if the Sermon on the Mount says something about metaphorical beer, perhaps there are implications for an age where something more like eighty proof whisky is all around us.